The sound of books from the readers’ voices
BookOrchestra is a concert.
BookOrchestra is a choir of readers.
BookOrchestra is almost a podcast.
BookOrchestra is an intimate moment of reading.
BookOrchestra is an orchestra of books. A mashup of voices and languages. A fragmented, fragile, ever-changing story whose meaning oscillates between the meaning of words, literary structures, and their sound.
Andrea Marinelli gathers a chorus of readers, conducts them live, and modifies them with live electronics, creating new scores, a new sound book. Cristian Ferretti, the demiurge of readers, a polyglot and radio host, creates the primordial layer by reading the first and last lines at each show, selecting the most acute and diaphonic books. Books themselves are at the heart of BookOrchestra, the idea of which was born in Potlach, the bookstore at Via Padova 65 in Milan, which, for over 30 years, has saved and regenerated these objects, with their silent nature and powerful sound.
Potlach Bookstore was born from a unique and radical Milanese experience of reclaiming books to give them a new value. A process of re-dissemination that begins with paper and involves relationships, encounters, disciplines, and knowledge.
Among the shelves of Potlach, I began to create musical compositions that took the book as a sound object, as phonetic, semiotic, and semantic material – Marinelli
Readers, often gathered directly at the concert venue, are not only voices lent to the BookOrchestra but also, and above all, interpreters of their own relationship with the book, words, and reading.
DISCOGRAPHY
1st EP https://www.safeportprod.com/
Live @Potlach 2023
BookOrchestra is and continues to support RadioGwen, an independent broadcaster in Italian-speaking Switzerland. Radio-based events that have given the orchestra momentum have taken place in its fixed and mobile studios, or inside a yurt.
DANGER:
BookOrchestra is a sound collage, a spontaneous textual performance from which emerges a web of meanings rich in oxymorons and literary friction.
Concert duration: 15 minutes to 1 hour
BookOrchestra performed for:
RadioGwen, Locarno Film Festival, Basecamp Locarno, Kilowatt Festival Sansepolcro, Babel Translation Festival in Bellinzona, Chiasso Literary Festival, Libreria Potlach Milan, La Tour Vagabonde, La Straordinaria Lugano, TECA Teatro Cassano and many others.
info@andreamarinelli.net